An Introduction to Mahara

May 18, 2010 - PRLog -- Mahara is an eportfolio system that works in tandem with Moodle.  Like Moodle, Mahara is an open source software with developer support available through it’s own community and peer support available through blogs, wikis etc.

Why use Mahara?

As an online portfolio, Mahara is a place to store institutional and personal learning articles or ‘artefacts’.  Students can use these artefacts to demonstrate their development over time to various audiences including prospective universities and future employers.

Mahara also provides a comprehensive blogging tool, social networking and a CV builder.  Users have their own personalised profiles which they can use to add employment and education history, accreditations, achievements and goals.  

Communities can be built within Mahara – users have the ability to connect with other users, create and maintain lists of friends. One of the features that differentiates Mahara from other ePortfolio systems is that users control which items and what information within their portfolio other users see.

Moodle and Mahara.

Mahara is designed to compliment Moodle, in fact many of the Mahara development team have also been involved in major Moodle development.  This means it is simple, straightforward and cost effective for Moodle educators to integrate Mahara as an eportfolio system.

A Moodle to Mahara network is very similar to Moodle to Moodle networking with the Mahara system being built on top of the Moodle network.  The networks can be set up to connect one Mahara system to one Moodle system, many to one, one to many or many to many systems.
A single-sign on capability allows users to be automatically logged in to both their Mahara and Moodle accounts by providing a username and password at only one of these sites.

Once set-up any Moodle content created could potentially become a Mahara artefact with students easily being able to export from Moodle to Mahara.  The Moodle content appears in Mahara rendered to HTML or a file that can easily be read by common applications (eg PDF).

Most importantly, like Moodle, Mahara is constantly being developed and updated thus providing a very solid framework for which to build on.

If you are interested in finding out more about Synergy Learning’s Mahara services visit http://www.synergy-learning.com.

# # #

Synergy Learning is the leading Moodle and Mahara Partner in the UK and Ireland. Synergy Learning has been creating professional, interactive elearning content for schools, colleges, universities, businesses and private training organisations since 1997 and has now has a global customer base. For more information visit http://www.synergy-learning.com